Revision as of 18:29, 1 August 2011

Converting Part objects to Meshes

Converting higher-level objects such as Part shapes into simpler objects such as meshes is a pretty simple operation, where all faces of a Part object get triangulated. The result of that triangulation (tessellation) is then used to construct a mesh:

Sometimes the triangulation of certain faces offered by OpenCascade is quite ugly. If the face has a rectangular parameter space and doesn't contain any holes or other trimming curves you can also create a mesh on your own:

import Mesh
def makeMeshFromFace(u,v,face):
(a,b,c,d)=face.ParameterRange
pts=[]
for j in range(v):
for i in range(u):
s=1.0/(u-1)*(i*b+(u-1-i)*a)
t=1.0/(v-1)*(j*d+(v-1-j)*c)
pts.append(face.valueAt(s,t))
mesh=Mesh.Mesh()
for j in range(v-1):
for i in range(u-1):
mesh.addFacet(pts[u*j+i],pts[u*j+i+1],pts[u*(j+1)+i])
mesh.addFacet(pts[u*(j+1)+i],pts[u*j+i+1],pts[u*(j+1)+i+1])
return mesh

Converting Meshes to Part objects

Converting Meshes to Part objects is an extremely important operation in CAD work, because very often you receive 3D data in mesh format from other people or outputted from other applications. Meshes are very practical to represent free-form geometry and big visual scenes, as it is very lightweight, but for CAD we generally prefer higher-level objects that carry much more information, such as the idea of solid, or faces made of curves instead of triangles.

Converting meshes to those higher-level objects (handled by the Part Module in FreeCAD) is not an easy operation. Meshes can be made of thousands of triangles (for example when generated by a 3D scanner), and having solids made of the same number of faces would be extremely heavy to manipulate. So you generally want to optimize the object when converting.

FreeCAD currently offers two methods to convert Meshes to Part objects. The first method is a simple, direct conversion, without any optimization: